In his catalog essay, Ebony situates the Abu Ghraib paintings within a formidable tradition of artistic responses to war, violence, and terror. He invokes Goya's great etchings, The Disasters of War, chronicling the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808; David Alfaro Siqueiros' dramatic murals picturing the torture of Mexicans by Spanish conquistadors; and, of course, Picasso's Guernica.

But I think a closer and more illuminating precedent for Botero's series can be found in the weird, figurative late work of Philip Guston. Though he made his name as an Abstract Expressionist, Guston repudiated abstraction in the late '60s and began painting in a crude, cartoonish style partly derived from early comics like Krazy Kat and Mutt and Jeff. His images from this period are grungy and menacing: Hooded Ku Klux Klansmen smoke cigars over breakfast, drive around in beat-up old convertibles, kick things with cobble-soled boots. When the work was first shown at Marlborough Gallery in 1970, many found the paintings puerile and offensive. But today, Guston is celebrated as one of the first artists to use the lowbrow language of comics to grapple with sinister political realities.